One Part Human
by Asviloka
Summary: Life of a horcrux: a flash fiction in three parts. AU.
1. One

They called him Harry Potter, and he didn't argue the point. He suspected they were lying, pretending to be his relatives to keep him docile, and he let them believe it was working. They cared nothing for him, and he gave the same consideration to their existence.

He wasn't here for this.

Nine years ago he'd made a terrible mistake. He couldn't remember what the mistake was, but it ended with him leaving the place he'd vaguely thought of as 'home' and being brought here. To people who called themselves his family, treated him like rubbish, and disliked him nearly as much as he hated them.

He had something else to do, but he couldn't say what. He felt incomplete, as though that forgotten mistake had cost him more than his home.

He liked to be high, climbing trees, fences, the roof. Staring out at the sky, the world spread below, it gave him the faintest sense that he may be in the right place. He wanted to fly away, but that was impossible.

He wasn't here for this.

"Boy, stop staring out the window and put some effort into it!" Petunia snapped.

"Yes Aunt Petunia," he replied, scrubbing a bit harder at the pan. Dudley's midnight bacon snack had left the pan full of congealed grease and Petunia's long morning shower had depleted the hot water, leaving him with an irritatingly difficult task that could have been simplified immensely by merely waiting a half hour.

"And hurry up, Dudders is going to need his breakfast on time for school."

"Yes Aunt Petunia," he replied, the response automatic by now. He rarely said anything else.

 _He wasn't here for this._

Scowling, he scraped the brush across the pan with increased vigor.


	2. Part

On Dudley's eleventh birthday, something changed.

Everything changed.

The darkness returned, darkness that he'd never even realized he'd been expecting. Darkness so comfortably familiar he couldn't have said how long he drifted in its warm, comfortable oblivion.

Flickers of life began to intrude. Moments, glimpses.

Dudley cringing away in fear, a sensation of long-overdue triumph and vengeance. Vernon's scowl, and a feeling of complete obliviousness, knowing the hated man was finally powerless to do anything.

Strangers' faces, a foreign and disquieting sensation accompanying them.

Then something changed again, and he returned to awareness. It was nighttime. Always nighttime, but that was no barrier to a creative and patient mind. He began to rebuild his life, reclaim his destiny. From faintest shreds of thought, recovered hints of memory, he began to work.

Deceptions, woven carefully through a tapestry of truth with thread so thin that no one would pick it out. Betrayals, planted and tended so carefully that their eventual fruit was perfection itself.

They still used the wrong name, when they saw him, but he signed his work with his own name, his true name.

They'd tried to contain him, tried to control him.

Time to show them just how wrong they were.


	3. Human

"Do you not have any shred of remorse?"

The voice was quiet, his own, whispered to a mirror. He watched his face, the gentle concern so foreign an expression, his lips moving without his volition.

"Don't you understand the pain you've caused me, our friends, the school, this whole community?"

He answered wordlessly, scorn sharpened enough to cut. He was pleased to see the face in the mirror flinch.

"Is there truly no way you'll let me save you?" his voice asked.

Resolve, hatred, scorn.

"I could destroy you at any moment, you know," the face in the mirror whispered.

Fear, quickly discarded, but very real. He cursed himself for feeling it at all, knew he was being scrutinized mentally even as he was controlled physically.

The face in the mirror shook his head sadly. "You truly respond only to threats? That is no way for an arrangement to be reached. I beg you, reconsider. Surely there is so much more you could do with your life? If you could change?"

It disgusted him, almost pained him, to see his own face looking so miserably pleading. It was disgraceful. It was horrifying. Hateful.

"No amount of discussion will change your mind, will it?"

Resolve, firm and angry.

"I have no desire to condemn another to destruction, even one as twisted and lost as yourself, but you give me no choice. Would you truly rather die than allow yourself to care?!"

He didn't care, that was the thing. He had tried, on occasion, to see what it was like. It hadn't worked. He simply didn't have that capacity. So he had stopped trying and moved on.

"I cannot save you," his voice whispered. "So I must destroy you."

Darkness returned, sudden and complete. He wondered what was happening, for the first time not content to drift in the emptiness. He fought the dark with a power and determination he hadn't known he possessed.

Lights flashed, spells flying. It was a battlezone, he realized, but it was the evening sky that drew his attention at once. He hadn't seen daylight in so long, it mesmerized him. He longed to fly there, free, not trapped here.

Battle raged and he watched passively as he fought, not in command of himself. Darkness cut in, moments were lost, evening advanced to night.

"This is not your fight," his voice whispered, and something slammed into his consciousness and sent him hurtling back into darkness.

He struggled, fought, but remained stranded. Slowly, grudgingly, he allowed the emptiness to overwhelm him, relaxing into the familiar dark.

Green light snapped him into focus. His face. . . his old face, the one he'd forgotten he ever wore, stared at him and for a moment he understood.

He was separated, split that moment by that mistake however many years ago. Reunited only now, only in destruction, because there was no other way he could have ended. He knew that now, watching his own spell coming to end him.

He had never been whole. Never been real. Only a tiny fragment, trapped in another's mind.

It was only then, staring into the cold face of his past, that he understood. And for the tiniest fraction of an instant before death reached him, he regretted.


End file.
